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Group Seeks to Jump-Start Ocean Protections

Peruvian fishermen unloading a net full of anchovies during an expedition in the Pacific.Credit Associated Press

A group of prominent officials from several nations are creating an independent body dedicated to making environmental protection a top priority in global policymaking involving the high seas.

The organization, the Global Ocean Commission, is to be led by the former Costa Rican president José María Figueres; Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s planning minister; and David Miliband, a former British foreign secretary. So far there is no American representation.

Mr. Milibrand described the United Nations Law of the Sea, which went into full force in 1994, as “a great achievement.” Still, “we urgently need a governance framework that delivers its aims and objectives for today’s global ocean,” he said.

The issue of the unregulated use of resources — critics would say “plundering” — has gained greater importance for environmentalists and policymakers as fishing fleets go ever further in search of their catch and private enterprises find new ways of exploiting offshore wealth, including the minerals that lie on or beneath the seabed.

“Without ever making a conscious decision to do it, we are losing unseen habitats whose equals on land would include the giant redwood glades of North America, the baobab trees of Madagascar and Amazon rainforest,” Callum Roberts, a marine biologist and author, wrote recently in The Guardian.

Between now and 2014, the commission said, it will “will analyze key threats to the international waters,” or waters that are more than 200 nautical miles offshore. “This large proportion of the global ocean is under severe and increasing pressure from overfishing, damage to important habitat, climate change and ocean acidification,” the organization said.

The body plans to make its findings public before the United Nations General Assembly meets next year to discuss biodiversity on the high seas.

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